Damon Knight - Orbit 15

The first visitor Walt permitted in the nursery was Clarence. After that there was no further talk of destroying the inhuman monstrosities.

There was a celebration party, and a drawing was held to select eleven female names and ten male. In the record book the babies were labeled R-1 strain: Repopulation 1. But in David’s mind, as in Walt’s, the babies were W-1, D-1, and soon, C-1 . . .

For the next months there was no shortage of nurses, male or female, no shortage of help doing any of the chores that so few had done before. Everyone wanted to become a doctor or a biologist, Walt grumbled, but he was sleeping more now, and the fatigue lines on his face were smoothing out. Often he would nudge David and tow him along, away from the nursery, propel him toward his own room in the hospital and see to it that he remained there for a night’s sleep. One night as they walked side by side back to their rooms, Walt said, “Now you understand what I meant when I said this was all that mattered, don’t you?”

David understood. Every time he looked down at the tiny, pink new Celia he understood more fully.

David watched the boys from the window in Walt’s office. There was Clarence, already looking too pudgy—he’d be fat in another three or four years. And a young Walt, frowning in concentration over a problem that he wouldn’t put on paper until he had a solution. Mark, too pretty almost, but determinedly manly, always trying harder than the others to endure, to jump higher, run faster, hit harder. And D-4, himself ... He turned away and pondered the future of the boys, uncles, fathers, grandfathers, all the same age. He was starting a headache again.

“They’re inhuman, aren’t they?” he said bitterly to Walt. “They come and go, and we know nothing about them. What do they think? Why do they hang so close to each other? Why won’t they talk to us?”

“Remember that old cliche, generation gap? It’s here, I reckon.” Walt was looking very old. He was tired, and seldom tried to hide it any longer. He looked up at David and said, “Maybe they’re afraid of us.”

David nodded. He had thought of that, too. “I know why Hilda did it,” he said. “I didn’t at the time, but now I know.” Hilda had strangled the small girl who looked more like her every day.

“Me too.” Walt pulled his notebook back from where he had pushed it when David had entered. “It’s a bit spooky to walk into a crowd that’s all you, in various stages of growth. They do cling to their own kind.” He started to write then, and David left him.

Spooky, he thought, and veered from the laboratory where he had been heading originally. Let the damn embryos do their thing without him. He knew he didn’t want to enter because D-1 or D-2 would be there working. The D-4 strain would be the one, though, to prove or disprove the experiment. If Four didn’t make it, then chances were that Five wouldn’t either, and then what? A mistake. Woops, wrong, sir. Sorry about that.

Behind the hospital, he climbed the ridge over the cave, and sat down on an outcrop of limestone that felt cool and smooth. The boys were clearing another field. They worked well together, with little conversation and much laughter that seemed to arise spontaneously. A line of girls came into view from nearer the river; they were carrying baskets of berries. Blackberries and gunpowder, he thought suddenly, and he remembered the ancient celebrations of the Fourth of July, with blackberry stains and fireworks, sulfur for the chiggers. And birds. Thrushes, meadowlarks, warblers, purple martins. Three Celias came into view, swinging easily with the weight of the baskets, a stairway succession of Celias. He shouldn’t do that, he reminded himself harshly. They weren’t Celias, none of them had that name. They were Mary and Ann and something else. He couldn’t remember for a moment the third one’s name, and he knew it didn’t matter. The one in the middle might have pushed him from the loft just yesterday; the one on the left might have been the one who rolled in savage combat with him in the mud.

Once, three years ago, he had had a fantasy in which Celia-3 had come to him shyly and asked that he take her. And in the fantasy he had taken her; in his dreams for weeks to come, he had taken her, over and over and over again. And he had awakened weeping for his own Celia. Unable to endure it any longer, he had sought out C-3 and asked her haltingly if she would come to his room with him, and she had drawn back quickly, involuntarily, with fear written too clearly on her smooth face for her to pretend it was not there.

“David, forgive me. I was startled . . .”

They were promiscuous, indeed it was practically required of them to be free in their loving. No one could anticipate how many of them eventually would be fertile, what the percentage of boys to girls would be. Walt was able to test the males, but since the tests for female fertility required rabbits, which they did not have, he said the best test for fertility was pregnancy. The children lived together, and promiscuity was the norm. But only with one another. They all shunned the elders. David had felt his eyes burning as the girl spoke, still moving away from him.

He had turned and left abruptly, and had not spoken to her again in the intervening years. Sometimes he thought he saw her watching him warily, and each time he glared at her and hurried away.

C-1 had been like his own child. He had watched her develop, watched her learn to walk, talk, feed herself. His child, his and Celia’s. C-2 had been much the same. A twin, somewhat smaller, identical nevertheless. But C-3 had been different. No, he corrected himself, his perceptions of her had been different. When he looked at her now he saw Celia, and he ached.

He had grown chilled on the ridge, and he realized that the sun had set long ago and that the lanterns had been lighted below. The scene looked pretty, like a sentimental picture titled “Rural Life.” The large farmhouse with glowing windows, the blackness of the barn; closer, the hospital and staff building with the cheerful yellow lights in the windows. Stiffly he descended into the valley again. He had missed dinner, but he was not hungry.

“David!” one of the youngest boys, a Five, called to him. David didn’t know whom he had been cloned from. There were many people he hadn’t known when they were that young. He stopped and the boy ran to him, then past him, calling as he went, “Dr. Walt wants you.”

On Walt’s desk and spread over a table were the medical charts of the Four strain. “I’ve finished,” Walt said. “You’ll have to double-check, of course.”

David scanned the final lines quickly, H-4 and D-4. He didn’t look up, but nodded. “Have you told the two boys yet?”

“I told them all. They understand.” Walt rubbed his eyes. “They have no secrets from each other,” he said. “They understand about the girls’ ovulation periods, about the necessity of keeping records. If any of those girls can conceive, they’ll do it.” His voice was almost bitter when he looked up at David. “They’re taking it over completely from now on.”

“What do you mean?”

“W-1 made a copy of my records for his files. He’ll follow it through.”

David nodded. The elders were being excluded again. The time was coming when they wouldn’t be needed for anything— extra mouths to feed, nothing else. He sat down and for a long time he and Walt sat in companionable silence.

In class the following day nothing seemed different. No pair bonding, David thought cynically. They accepted being mated as casually as the cattle did. If there was any jealousy of the two fertile males, it was well hidden. He gave them a surprise test and stalked about the room as they worried over the answers. They would all pass, he knew—not only pass, but do well. They had motivation. They were learning in their teens what he hadn’t grasped in his twenties. There were no educational frills, no distractions. Work in the classroom, in the fields, in the kitchens, in the laboratories. They worked interchangeably, incessantly— the first really classless society. He pulled his thoughts back when he realized that they were finishing already. He had allowed an hour, and they were finishing in forty minutes—slightly longer for the Fives, who, after all, were two years younger than the Fours.